When a user watches a piece of media content such as a movie, television show, or sports program, the user may wish to return a particular location in the media content that represents high user interest. Some media playing devices will remember the location at which the user stopped watching such that the user can easily pick up from exactly that location in the media content. For example, some DVD players will remember the location at which a user stopped watching a movie and automatically re-start playing the movie at that location. However, this technique is limited in that it only remembers a single location in the media content, as opposed to multiple locations of interest in the media content. Moreover, the location at which the user stopped watching does not necessarily reflect a location of high user interest. In contrast, that location might actually represent low user interest.
Some techniques allow users to explicitly create bookmarks, and thus may allow a user to mark locations of high user interest. For example, Internet browsers allow a user to explicitly create bookmarks for web pages visited by the user. The web browser adds a short written description of the web page to a list of bookmarks and associates a URL of the web page with the written description. Therefore, the user can revisit the web page during a later browsing session by selecting the written description from the list. While bookmarks created by a web browser may allow a user to mark web pages of high user interest, typically this technique requires the user to explicitly mark each web page. Having to create the bookmarks explicitly might be acceptable when a user is browsing the Internet because the user needs to perform other explicit actions anyway, such as moving on to another web page. Thus, the added action of explicitly creating a bookmark is not too onerous. However, for other applications having to explicitly mark a location of user interest could be quite tedious for the user.